MEDIA: Natalie O’Brien on Rabbi Hilaly?

I’ve written elsewhere about how Natalie O’Brien, a senior reporter for The Australian, has suggested that Sheik Hilaly is somehow linked to Usama bin-Ladin. It seems that, according to O'Brien, if you find yourself on the same side of an argument as bin-Ladin, you are somehow linked to him.

But now, having re-read the same article, it also seems that O’Brien is suggesting that Sheik Hilaly delivers his Friday sermons on Saturdays. Do we apply O'Brien's convoluted logic and presume Hilaly is also linked to the Beth Din?

Read these paragraphs and wonder …

At his sermon at Australia's biggest mosque, in the southwest Sydney suburb of Lakemba, Sheik Hilali said the cartoons, published in a Danish newspaper in 2005 - and republished last month - showed the "hatred and envy" felt by the West against Islam.

He said today's sermon at the mosque would be followed by a march to a nearby park to protest against the cartoons …

At his sermon today, Sheik Hilali is expected to … He will make an appeal to …

In his sermon, Sheik Hilali will also …

He will say … He will express his grief at …

Um, is she talking about two separate sermons? Or is the same sermon being delivered in two instalments? Or is Sheik Hilaly delivering his Friday sermon on a Saturday?

© Irfan Yusuf 2008

BOOKS: Light-hearted memoir dispels Muslim stereotypes with deft

Unimagined: a Muslim boy meets the West
Imran Ahmad
Aurum Press Pty Limited, London
2007
HB: $35

Unimagined is the story of a middle-class English boy who goes to a grammar school, completes university studies, falls in love with various girls and women along the way and ends up pursuing a career in the internal audit department of a major multinational, earning enough money to buy a house and the same Jaguar his hero James Bond drives.

So what on earth does all this have to do with Islam? How can we understand the processes of alienation, terrorism, violence, lack of integration and all that other nasty stuff we allegedly need to understand in order to understand Western Muslims? How does this book help us understand them when it provides us with only the picture of one with whom we can readily identify?

This memoir contains no violence (apart from some schoolyard bullying and references to news reports of overseas events), no honour killings and only the feeblest reference to a possible arranged marriage. In fact, what makes this work so abnormal among so many other Muslim memoirs published in Britain, such as Ed Husain's The Islamist and former Guantanamo inmate Moazzam Begg's Enemy Combatant, is that the life it describes is just so normal.

Don't expect to find cultural warriors like Melanie Phillips (author of Londonistan) or Daniel Pipes (journalist and director of the Middle East Forum) referring to this book as an example of British or Western Islam in action (or should that be inaction?). Imran Ahmad has written an amusing and highly accessible book which deals with a range of theological and cross-cultural issues by telling the story of the Muslim he knows best.

One lesson we learn from this book is that for many Muslims, religion can only be understood within a cultural context, often with little relation to that within which a certain 7th-century Arabian Prophet presented his message. In practice, this means many South-Asian Muslim parents have almost identical expectations of their children as South-Asian Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Catholic or Jewish parents. It is of little consequence to such parents whether you can read the Koran in Arabic or the Guru Granth in Punjabi or even the Torah in Hebrew. So long as you study hard and become a doctor or engineer and marry a good South-Asian girl of your own social class and faith (with emphasis especially put on the former), not much else matters.

Perhaps what makes Imran's experience different from that of an English boy of Hindu or Sikh parents is that his own faith and scriptures share much in common with the Biblical stories he learned in school. I can certainly relate to this as an important factor allowing me to ''fit in'' more easily.

Don't expect to find cultural warriors like Melanie Phillips or Daniel Pipes referring to this book as an example of British or Western Islam in action. For me, the discovery that the Koranic account of Joseph's life was virtually identical to that in the Bible (and that my own surname was merely an Arabic pronunciation of this famous person) was a seminal moment in the development of my own religious identity.

I did find it unusual that Ahmad's parents were happy for their son to attend religion classes limited to the Old Testament only. My own parents insisted I learn what Christians (at least those of the Anglican variety) believed. Perhaps

this lack of exposure to New Testament theology made it harder for Ahmad to face what little intellectual challenge could be posed by the "Rapture" theology of his fellow university students sucked in by American commercial evangelism.

Like so many other South-Asian migrants to Britain, Ahmad receives only the bare minimum religious education in childhood. He lasts only a short time at the Sunday school of his local mosque. Ahmad learns more about religion at school, and ends up knowing more about Old Testament prophets (also mentioned in the Koran) than about contemporaries and successors of the Prophet Muhammad.

In fact, like so many children of Muslim migrants, Ahmad must figure out the answers to a range of theological questions without assistance from parents or imams. Instead, most of his learning is at the University of Sterling in Scotland, where Ahmad has enrolled in a chemistry course in which he takes no interest, but which he believes might make him more employable and respectable in South-Asian circles.

Theological issues feature heavily in the book, with Ahmad constantly toiling with the whole idea of spending an eternity burning in hell because he made the wrong religious choice. Ahmad is also troubled by certain moral choices, and operates on the common South-Asian Muslim presumption that salvation is obtained by doing good deeds and avoiding naughty ones.

Ahmad spends hours in the library reading books about Sufism, and also borrows tapes of religious polemics from fellow students. He is put off by the narrow-mindedness of the chap who delivers sermons at Friday prayers, but is attracted to the intellectualism of study circles organised in a London mosque by Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens).

Ahmad doesn't venture anywhere near political Islam. Perhaps this is because he had already entered the workforce by the time the Afghan jihad and its Islamist theology was being promoted by conservative governments and right-wing think tanks (not to mention mosque imams) across the West.

This book is a rather light read, making it accessible to a wide audience. Ahmad has no difficulty in poking fun at himself, whether describing his childish approach to theology as an infant or his almost equally childish and extremely shy approach to women as an adult. In its focus on everyday issues and its sheer ordinariness, Ahmad's memoir dispatches the myths of Muslim-phobic cultural warriors with almost as much ease as an in-form Nasser Hussein would have dispatched the deliveries of his opponents when he captained England's national cricket side.

Irfan Yusuf is associate editor of AltMuslim.com. His book proposal about young Australian Muslims navigating their way out of political Islam received the 2007 Allen & Unwin Iremonger Award for public affairs writing. This review was first published in the Canberra Times on 22 March 2008.

© Irfan Yusuf 2008

MOROCCO: Liquid gold ...

I was clearing through my old editions of the Australian Financial Review when I came across an article hiding in the Travel section of the December 21-27 edition. The article was reproduced from the New York Times and was given the headline of “A holiday that guarantees you strike liquid gold”.

The liquid gold in question was the oil of a nut called argan. The argan tree which produces the nut can be found in a coastal town of Morocco called Essaouira, once a Portuguese fishing village now populated largely by Berbers.

Essaouira apparently was once a huge hippy hang-out, boasting of the patronage of such greats as Cat Stevens and Jimi Hendrix. Today, the town is more famous for its liquid gold, the paste produced from the argan nut which has become a major source of income for local Berber women.

Morocco may not be the most democratic nation on earth, but its King (Muhammad VI) is regarded as having a more enlightened attitude when it comes to women’s rights. The King has started supporting the formation of coops managed by women which produce argun oil that then makes its way into various skin cremes. Apparently the argan oil and paste have a high concentration of Vitamin E, not to mention phytosterols which are good for treating scar tissue and lacklustre skin.

So how is the oil/paste made? Amy Larocca writes in the AFR/NYT story ...

Approaching Essaouira’s sandy-colored ramparts, passing the olive groves and grazing donkeys, you see signs announcing women-run argan cooperatives: Argan Co-Op, Women’s Argan Collective, Miracle Oil. And so on. If you pull over to a cooperative, the Berber women — and it is only women who make argan oil — will often invite you in to watch them work. In most of the cooperatives, the older village women sit in the courtyard and work as the younger bilingual girls walk you around, giving a tutorial about the process. (Pull over too many times, though, and be prepared to hear all about the process again. And again.)

The nuts, which look like a cross between a walnut and an almond, are picked out of the fruit of the squat, gnarled argan trees that dot the yellow hills above Essaouira. Depending on the season, there might be goats up in the branches, munching on the fruit. The nuts destined for salad oil are roasted on an open flame over a large steel drum, like chestnuts, which brings out their distinctive peppery flavor; those that will be used for skin- and hair-care products are left raw.

The women first crack the shells with sharp stones. They then place the kernels between two Flintstone-size slabs of rock, grinding them into a brown paste, which resembles chunky peanut butter. The paste, kneaded by hand to extract the oil, transforms into a solid hunk and is sent to nearby factories, mainly in Agadir, where more oil is extracted by a press. Some is made into soaps, creams and shampoos, but it is the pure oil that is most sought after.

And how are the coops managed? How do they get funding? What kind of support do their receive from local and overseas investors?

... thanks to the substantial efforts of the Moroccan King Mohammed VI (who has been praised for his efforts to promote women’s rights) and the local government, the oil is being exported worldwide, moving from the mud-and-stone co-ops into spas and Sephoras around the world.

Because the extraction of argan oil is a labor-intensive task perfected by the Berber women native to the area (it takes a few days to produce one liter), the government has established a fund for the cooperatives. Outside groups, like the government of Monaco, have gotten involved as backers. Women from the villages nearby are invited to work half days (so they can still tend to their families) in exchange for fair wages and good working conditions. Eventually, the cooperatives should pay for themselves. Unesco has designated the 10,000-square-mile argan-growing region as a biosphere reserve.

Meanwhile, more Western cosmetic companies are starting to distribute this “liquid gold,” as it is often called. Liz Earle, who runs an organic skin-care line in England, uses argan oil that she buys from two of the cooperatives in Essaouira in her Superskin Concentrate.

Yep, globalised capitalism can benefit the otherwise economically vulnerable. And it seems not all Muslim monarchs are despots.



Words © Irfan Yusuf 2008

SPAIN: Where did all the mosques go?

Some years back, I read a book by an English Muslim author named Ahmed Thomson. The book concerned the history of Islam in Spain during and after its Jewish-Muslim golden age. That was a time when Cordoba housed the largest mosque on the planet. And when people of all denominations flocked to al-Andalus in search of knowledge, wealth, health or just somewhere to live in peace.

Basically, people went to Spain for the same reason so many people settle in Australia or New Zealand or some other stable Western country.

Today, Australia has plenty of Muslims and no shortage of mosques. In fact, in some cities and localities, we have too many mosques. When I was growing up, we had to travel 30 minutes to get to our nearest mosque. Now, we have 2 or 3 mosques within 5 minutes drive. One of these mosques was established when there was a split in the leadership of the other nearby mosque. The splinter faction went 3 km south-east and established a small prayer hall adjacent to a shopping centre carpark.

These days there are so many splinter-group mosques that it is hard to know where all the splintering started. One community elder once told me that even the Imam Ali ben Abi Taleb mosque in Lakemba started out as an ethnic splinter mosque.

Yet if a recent article in the New York Times is any indication, it seems we should start exporting some of our mosques to Spain. It seems that in many Spanish towns, Muslims have had to start saying their Friday congregational prayers in converted garages.

Although Spain is peppered with the remnants of ancient mosques, most Muslims gather in dingy apartments, warehouses and garages like the one on North Street, pressed into service as prayer halls to accommodate a ballooning population.

The mosque shortage stems partly from the lack of resources common to any relatively poor, rapidly growing immigrant group.

Then, of course, there is the usual factor of ordinary Muslims with no interest in violence or even politics having to suffer thanks to the violence of a few extremist ratbags.

But in several places, Muslims trying to build mosques have also met resistance from communities wary of an alien culture or fearful they will foster violent radicals.

Distrust sharpened after a group of Islamists bombed commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004, killing 191 people, and in several cities, local governments, cowed by angry opposition from non-Muslims, have blocked Muslim groups from acquiring land for mosques.

Complicating the issue is Spain's historical enmity between Islam and Catholicism and the steady rise in Muslim migration that has only taken place in the last decade or so.

Muslims ruled much of Spain for centuries, but after they were ultimately vanquished in the 1400s, their mosques were either left to ruin or converted into churches. Since then, fewer than a dozen new mosques have been built to serve Spain’s Muslim population, which has grown in the past 10 years to about one million from about 50,000 as immigrants have poured into the country.

That rise has coincided with a decline in church attendance in overwhelmingly Catholic Spain, giving new echo to an old rivalry between the two religions. It was the Catholic king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, who defeated the last Moorish ruler in Spain in 1492 and oversaw the expulsion of Jews and Muslims. Now, as churches struggle to draw a dwindling flock, Muslim prayer halls are overflowing.

“The reality of this country has changed much faster than that of other countries,” Ángel Ros, Lleida’s mayor, said in an interview. “A process that took 30 years in Italy or France has taken 10 years in Spain.”

The situation is so bad that in one region of Spain, the local parliament is even considering passing a law forcing local councils to allow land to be set aside of religious buildings, including mosques.

... the ruling coalition in Catalonia submitted a bill in the regional parliament in December that would oblige local governments to set aside land for mosques and other places of worship. Representatives of Muslim organizations hope it will inspire a similar national law.

“People are realizing the world has changed and they can’t look the other way,” said Mohammed Chaib, a member of the Catalan parliament and the only Muslim lawmaker in Spain.

Not everyone sees things the same way.

Cardinal Luis Martínez Sistach, archbishop of Barcelona, opposes the bill, which would entitle all religious groups to land on an equal basis. He argues that Catholicism requires different rules.

“A church, a synagogue or a mosque are not the same thing,” he said, according to the conservative Spanish newspaper ABC. The bill, he said, “impinges on our ability to exercise a fundamental right, that of religious liberty.”

While no law on religious land use exists, the wealthy Catholic Church faces no difficulty acquiring land, experts in law and religion say ... Spain’s secular state cannot finance religious buildings, though it has a special arrangement to subsidize the Catholic Church.

And we thought we had it bad here in Australia.

© Irfan Yusuf 2008

COMMENT: Hirsi Magaan and the loopy bloggers ...

I have a google alert on the name "Ayaan Hirsi Ali". I'm interested to find out what kind of publicity can be gained by abandoning Islam and adopting far-Right pseudo-liberal politics. Each day, I receive at least 3 places where Hirsi Magaan (her real name) is referred to. Mostly these mentions are in far-Right blogs where she is promoted as some poor suffering brave woman forced to seek sanctuary and faced with the burden of counting so much cash from her best-selling autobiography.

Yep, it's a tough job but someone has to do it.

One such blog mention sent to me today is at this blog. I almost vomited when I read the references to bravery. Seriously, what planet are these loopy bloggers living on? I couldn't help but leave this response ...

There is nothing brave about people like Ibn Warraq and Ayaan Hirsi Magaan (Hirsi Ali is the false name she used to defraud Dutch immigration authorities).

The fact is that Ms Hirsi Magaan travels freely around the world, with little or no threat from anyone.

I myself interviewed Ms Hirsi Magaan when she was in Sydney for the Sydney Writers' Festival. I sat within 30 cm of her, and no guards were present.

However, ultra-Right cultural warriors determined to generate war with anyone not as culturally chauvinistic as them will always paint the Hirsi Magaans as brave.

There are Muslims working within Muslim communities seeking genuine reform.

They risk their lives trying to work within the communities. They don't take the easy (and lucrative) option of just giving up on their faith and communities and seeking (often by dishonest means) "refuge" in Western countries.

I myself have received death threats because of stands I have taken. What do I do? Do I go crying to Daniel Pipes begging him to write a column about my bravery? Do I seek refuge in the EU under a false name? Or do I quietly struggle on?

Real struggle is carried on without behaving like a drama queen in a neo-Conservative pantomine. But I doubt readers of this and other far-Right blogs will appreciate that.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


Bookmark this on Delicious

MEDIA: Did Dicky misrepresent Laurie Ferguson?

In the Crikey daily alert for 11 March 2008, ANU researcher Shakira Hussein suggests that my old buddy Dicky Kerbaj from The Australian may have been engaging in some poetic (or should that be journalistic?) license in relation to comments made by Minister for Multicultural Affairs (and Federal Member for Reid, perhaps the most multicultural federal electorate in the country) Laurie Ferguson.

I'd have to say I never suspected Dicky would be putting words and policies into Laurie's mouth. Further, Dicky's report (that any future Muslim Reference Group advising the Federal Government would focus less on male middle aged migrant religious leaders) was certainly a breath of fresh air compared to the coposition of John Howard's Reference Group.

Yet Ms Hussein actually appears to have spoken to Mr Ferguson on the issue.

This morning, the paper [as in The Australian] reports that the federal government is considering appointments to a new Muslim advisory board. The Muslim Community Reference Group established under the previous government was dominated by conservative religious leaders. It became a lightning rod for internal Muslim community conflicts and recriminations, and was eventually discontinued. The Australian reported that Ferguson is determined that any new government appointed body should represent a wider cross-section of Muslims, and include secular as well as religious figures.

But The Oz may have exaggerated the government's intentions a little with the headline "Rudd's quest for true blue Muslims." In an interview with Crikey this morning, Ferguson hosed down talk of a re-established reference group, emphasising that any such plans were at a very early stage. While the government is "mindful of the need for dialogue" with Muslim communities, it was impossible to say what shape that dialogue might take.

I sure hope that this government spends more time listening to ordinary Aussie Muslims, many if not most of whom aren't terribly observant. I hope they abandon the previous government's approach of talking about and at Muslims instead of talking to them.

© Irfan Yusuf 2008


Bookmark this on Delicious

COMMENT: Four Corners episode "On Dangerous Ground" ...

Around 300,000 Australians tick the “Muslim” box on their census forms. They don’t have to tick the box. In fact, they don’t have to tick any religion box.

But the public image of these people is determined largely by the statements, actions and responses of (and reports about) the more religiously observant among them. Why?

Laurie Ferguson, Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs, had some sound answers which my old pal Dicky Kerbaj has reported in front page story in the 11 March edition of The Australian:

Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs Laurie Ferguson told The Australian yesterday… religious leaders were not representative of the mainstream Muslim community …

“A lot of it is about symbolism; it's about who gets promoted and who gets identified and who gets an option to be seen by Australian society.

“Australia has produced (Muslim) academics, business types, sporting types and it's often not celebrated enough."

Mr Ferguson said the idea that all Muslims were religious was a "misconception" he wanted debunked.

Well hurrah for Mr Ferguson! I know few people (including imams) more qualified to speak about the variety within Muslim communities than an MP with more Muslims and a greater ethnic and linguistic mix of them in his electorate than any other Federal Member of the House of Representatives.

Sadly, Monday’s episode of Four Corners largely repeated the tired old stereotypes and interviewed the usual suspects. The only young Muslims we heard from were habibs with omogaud accents and long beards together with their young macho students.

(And girls wearing Lebanese-style head scarves. Though they couldn’t get a single word in.)

By the end of the show, a tourist watching in their hotel room could be forgiven for believing our nation was just one huge battleground between redneck skips and alienated Arab/Lebanese Muslims. The vast majority of (non-redneck) Anglo-Europeans and (non-alienated Aussie-born) Muslims (many of whom are also Anglo-Europeans) were left out of the “Dangerous Ground” picture.

So how do the 40% of Aussie Muslims born in Australia and having ancestry from over 60 different countries actually feel about foreign policy, youth alienation, national security and other issues about which they are supposed to be obsessed with? The simple answer is: I wouldn’t have the faintest.

And I doubt anyone else does. Because no one, in particular no religious body claiming to represent Aussie Muslims, has bothered to ask these forgotten Muslims what they actually think.

One important message from the Four Corners episode was that the most effective weapons in fighting terrorism are communities. But how can you engage communities until you actually know who they are and what they are thinking? Or do we just rely on the kinds of middle-aged male religious leaders that our former PM placed on his Muslim Community Reference Group? Or self-serving young “leaders” of one ethnicity playing the same “gate keeper” games as their elders?

UPDATE 1: The Austrolabe blog's insightly comments on the story can be found here.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


Bookmark this on Delicious

CRIKEY: Dr Ramadan and slur by association

Some Crikey writers have speculated about a change in government possibly leading to our national broadsheet toning down some of its far-Right cultural warrior ways. But if the journalistic lynching of Swiss-born philosopher and author Dr Tariq Ramadan in The Australian is anything to go by, monocultural hawks at the paper aren’t giving up without a fight.

Leading the sectarian attack against Dr Ramadan over the weekend was new Opinion Editor of The Oz Rebecca Weisser. She makes a huge issue of the fact that Dr Ramadan happens to be the grandson of the late Hasan al-Banna, the founder of an Egyptian organisation called al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen (literally “Muslim Brotherhood”).

Yes, and? Is Weisser alleging that Dr Ramadan agrees with everything his grandfather’s movement stood for? Using the same reasoning, would Ms Weisser also allege that Senator Eric Abetz is a neo-Nazi? After all, Senator Abetz’s great uncle played a senior role in a rather nasty political movement that held sway over much of Europe during the first half of the 20th century.
Abetz rightly refers to those who play the game of “slur … by association with such a distant relative” as being completely unfair and un-Australian. It would be a shame if an editor of a newspaper calling itself The Australian would engage in such un-Australian conduct.

It’s hardly surprising Weisser provides space on her page to tabloid columnist Melanie Phillips. Some readers might recall Phillips’ visit to Australia some 12 months back to promote her book Londonistan, which makes the extraordinary claim that political Islamism is the dominant strain in contemporary Muslim societies. I’d love to see her make that claim in Pakistan, where Islamist parties suffered near-annihilation in recent elections.

Phillips’ diatribe against Dr Ramadan includes the extraordinary claim that he supports the implementation of sharia (Islamic sacred law) as the law of the land in all (including Western) countries. She obviously hasn’t read Ramadan’s call for draconian criminal punishments often associated with sharia to be the subject of an indefinite moratorium where they exist in Muslim-majority states. She also doesn’t refer to Ramadan’s criticism of the recent sharia speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Ramadan is attending a 3-day conference in Brisbane starting today. Prior to his arrival in Australia, Dr Ramadan visited New Zealand where his tour was supported by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs & Trade. None of the Kiwi papers made a fuss about the visit.

First published in the Crikey daily alert on Monday 3 March 2008.

© Irfan Yusuf 2008


Bookmark this on Delicious